Robert Smithson

The artist Robert Smithson is best known for the ''Spiral Jetty,'' which has lain in the Great Salt Lake since 1970. Born in Passaic, N.J., in 1938, Smithson died at 35 in an airplane crash in 1973.

Since 1999, as drought has lowered the water level, this famous American earth sculpture — a 1,500-foot coil of black basalt rocks — has slowly re-emerged. Now it is completely exposed; the rocks encrusted with white salt crystals are surrounded by shallow pink water in what looks like a vast snow field.

When Smithson built the ''Jetty,'' which is considered his masterpiece, the giant black coil contrasted starkly with the dark pink water of the lake. But time and nature have left their marks. Thousands of people have visited this once-elusive artwork, sometimes hauling off parts of it as souvenirs.

The Dia Art Foundation owns the work and has been exploring the idea of systematically documenting the site, photographing it from year to year to give curators and conservators a better idea of how it is changing and a better basis for making decisions about whether to intervene.

Smithson also created "Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island." His sketch was of a toy tug pulling a boat covered in rocks and trees, as if it were a shard of Central Park, a green and rocky iceberg. The work, 150 tons of conceptual art on a barge, was pulled by a real tugboat around Manhattan in 2005.

He was one of a number of artists in the 1960s and early 70s who chose to build site-specific pieces outdoors in the West, far from the commercialism of art galleries. Smithson in particular was intrigued by the idea of entropy, the inevitable disintegration of all objects in nature.

Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of The New York Times, described Smithson as "an academics' darling." He was, Mr. Kimmelman wrote, "a smooth-talking multimedia philosopher of the urban and suburban landscapes whose best-known work, 'Spiral Jetty,' while not the most successful of the great earth sculptures of the era, is an icon of Americana. Smithson's death at 35 in a plane crash while surveying the site for another planned earthwork has made him art's James Dean."

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